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Hume: New CAMH campus a sign of civic and mental health

The most outstanding thing about the new CAMH campus at Queen and Ossington is that nothing stands out.

It’s not the new buildings, courtyards and green spaces aren’t attractive, they are. But what’s important is that they could be in almost any other part of the city. They are contemporary, light-filled, urban, and, most emphatically, normal, which is precisely what’s intended.

CAMH has transformed an isolated campus into a new neighbourhood integrated into the West Queen West community, determined to break down the stigma of mental illness . (VINCE TALOTTA / TORONTO STAR)

That this should be the message from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, says volumes about the maturity of a city that until fairly recently preferred to hide places such as this as far as possible from our prying but tender eyes.

Lest we be offended, the mentally ill were labelled lunatics and locked up. The original structure was a massive domed fortress set behind an enormous brick wall. It was never clear, however, whether the wall was meant to keep inmates in or outsiders out. In either case, the point was that these people needed to be segregated and made invisible.

The redesigned campus starts from the opposite point of view. The buildings and the roads they line — all new — are declarations that mental illness is as much a part of Toronto as mental health.

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The architectural consortium that designed the three structures — Montgomery Sisam, Kearns Mancini and KPMB — are three of the city’s most distinguished practices. Wisely, they resisted the urge to overdo things. After all, these aren’t condo towers. Though understated, the buildings are elegant, even sophisticated. The language, like the materials, is contemporary.

More important, perhaps, is the fact that the street grid has been extended through the CAMH campus. With this simple step, the site has been returned to the city. The light of 21st-century urbanity now shines on the darkness of earlier times.

Inside, the rooms resemble something from a university residence; the spaces aren’t fancy, but they’re open and filled with light. There are opportunities to be alone and to gather in groups of any size.

One of the most engaging rooms is one set aside for religious meetings of all sorts; it is an empty corner of the building with two glass walls facing out to the grounds below.

“It’s really important that kids feel they matter,” says administrative director Chris Bartha of the 14- to 18-year-olds who have arrived at CAMH because of serious addiction and mental heath problems. “The place is meant to be normalized.”

Though the intention is to eliminate the stigma attached to such an institution, architecture alone can’t manage that. But it can set the scene and make it clear, if only subliminally, that we all inhabit the same city. Toronto belongs to all of us.

The sense of isolation so many clients have railed against may never completely disappear, but it won’t be because of the buildings; they do their job admirably. Indeed, CAMH’s new streetscapes could serve as an excellent model for modern cities where mid-rise and mixed-use are the order of the day.

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So it’s no surprise the reinvention of the site has itself turned out to be a community-building exercise; sponsors, corporate and individual, lined up to get involved, something few would have dared back when.

True to form, getting bureaucratic approval took years. Architect Alice Liang, of Montgomery Sisam, has been working on the project since 2001. That may seem unnaturally long, but Liang calls it a “typical healthcare timeline.”

Those years saw the start of a change that remains incomplete, but which has already transformed CAMH, and with it, the city.

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